Watch Them Die

by Kevin O'Brien

  “You’re going to loathe me,” she said when Joyce answered on the other end. “I’ll be another hour—at least. Does that screw you up?”

  “Yes, hon, I have a date with Robert Redford tonight. He’s picking me up at ten. Ha, don’t sweat it. Everything’s copacetic here. In fact, want to say good night to my pal here? I’m taking the cordless into his room.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw Ben urgently signaling to her. She glanced over her shoulder. Paul Gulletti came down the hallway with a folder tucked under his arm.

  Hannah swivelled around so her back was to him. She could see his reflection in the darkened window across the lounge. He was coming at her.

  “Hi, Mom,” she heard Guy say on the other end of the line.

  “Hi, honey,” she whispered, shrinking away as Paul Gulletti drew closer. “Um, how are you feeling?”

  “The chicken pox itches a lot today,” he whimpered. He sounded groggy. “Is Ben spending the night?”

  “Yes, but—um, you’ll be asleep by the time we come home.”

  Paul passed her, and continued down the corridor to the elevators.

  “Why aren’t you guys home now?” Guy was asking on the other end of the line. “I want to see Ben.”

  The elevator arrived for Paul, and he stepped aboard. Meanwhile, Ben gave her a secret wave; then he hurried up the hallway and turned the corner to Paul’s office.

  “Mom?”

  “You’ll see Ben in the morning, honey,” Hannah said into the phone. “I love you. Now, give the phone back to Joyce, and get some sleep.”

  In the background, she heard Joyce talking to him. The four students who were in the lounge all left together, slowly moving toward the stairwell. One girl’s laughter echoed in the hallway.

  “Hi,” Joyce said, back on the line. “As you can tell, someone’s a little cranky. I think he’ll be down for the count after a session with Dr. Seuss.”

  “Well, I should be home sometime around ten-thirty,” Hannah said. “I’m sorry to screw up your whole evening like this.”

  “I’ll see you when I see you. And if you’re with that tall drink of water from this morning, please don’t rush home on my account.”

  Hannah let out a sad laugh. “That’s not how it is with us. But thanks anyway. See you soon, Joyce.”

  She hung up the phone, then turned around in time to see Paul Gulletti step out of the elevator. Hannah froze. She wondered why the hell he was back so soon.

  They were the only two people in the corridor. Paul started toward her. The closer he got, the more he smirked. “Well, hello, stranger,” he said at last. He looked her up and down. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you,” Hannah explained, forcing a smile. “I was just about to leave a message at your office.”

  “Well, I walked by here only two minutes ago,” Paul said. “I didn’t see you, Hannah. It’s been too long. You know, you missed my last class.”

  “Yes, I’m—sorry about that.” She glanced down the other corridor toward Paul’s office. “It’s um—one reason I wanted to see you, Paul,” she said loudly. “Also I wanted to ask what you thought of the notes I e-mailed. You know, the ones about the blacklist?”

  He laughed. “What are you shouting for?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, I’m sorry. I have a little of that inner ringing in my ear. It’s gone now.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “Come to my office with me. I forgot something in there earlier. Now, I’m glad I did.”

  She hesitated, then started walking with him. “So—about the notes, Paul?” she asked, a bit too loudly again.

  “I haven’t gotten around to them yet.” He smiled. “But it doesn’t mean you haven’t been on my mind, Hannah.”

  She started talking about the content of her notes, babbling really. All the while, she hoped Ben could hear them approaching.

  Paul unlocked the door, stepped inside, and switched on the overhead light. Hannah glanced back at the hallway, half-expecting to see Ben hiding in one of the other doorways. But there was no sign of him.

  She walked into the office, where Paul circled around to the other side of his desk. He lifted up a miniature fake Oscar that served as a paperweight, then grabbed a key hidden beneath it and unlocked his desk drawer.

  Standing near the door, Hannah took in the office, her eyes darting back and forth. She wondered how Ben could have escaped without so much as a sound.

  Paul pulled some reading glasses from the desk drawer, locked it, then returned the key to its place under the ersatz mini-Oscar. He looked up at her and smiled. “You know, standing there in that black sweater with your blond hair, you look like a Hitchcock leading lady.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “I’m not sure if you look more like Grace Kelly or Eva Marie Saint,” he said, slipping the glasses in his breast pocket. “You’ve got that kind of classic beauty, Hannah. I’ve always thought so. I was very disappointed last week when you turned down my dinner invitation. Maybe you’ve reconsidered. Is that what this little visit is about?”

  “Sort of,” Hannah replied. “I’d like to go out with you, Paul. I just haven’t had any time recently. But—” Hannah stopped in mid-sentence.

  Something in the tall picture window caught her eye. The sill was a couple of feet off the ground, and Paul had a stack of film books on one end. On the other end, Ben stood motionless behind the folds of the open beige curtain. His back pressed against the glass, he gazed down at her.

  She shifted her eyes back to Paul. “Um, I have a sick little boy at home. I—I can’t see you this week. Maybe next week?” She let out a nervous laugh. “I guess what I’m saying is I’d like a rain check on that date, if the offer still stands.”

  Grinning, Paul came toward her. “You bet it does,” he whispered. “And I’m holding you to it.” He kissed his fingertip, then touched her lips.

  Hannah managed to keep smiling. She stole a glance up at Ben again. “Maybe we should go,” she said to Paul. “They’ll probably be locking up soon.”

  He took her by the arm and led her out of the office. Paul switched off the light, then closed and locked the door. “Speaking of Hitchcock and his blondes, we’re showing The Birds in class this Thursday. I hope you’re not planning another no-show.”

  “I’ll try to be there,” Hannah said, starting down the hall with him. Their footsteps echoed in the vacant corridor. “I, um, haven’t seen The Birds in a while.”

  “Remember the scene near the end of the movie, when Tippi Hedren hears the wings flapping somewhere on the second floor of the house? She grabs a flashlight and goes up to the bedroom to investigate. Remember?”

  Hannah nodded. “She gets attacked by all those birds.”

  Paul rang for the elevator. “Do you know what kind of special effects they used for that scene?”

  Hannah shook her head. She was having a hard time following his conversation. She wondered how she was going to get rid of Paul. She didn’t feel safe alone with him. As the elevator door opened, she balked.

  He took her by the arm again, then led her inside. She quickly pressed the button for the first floor. Paul’s shoulder rubbed against hers. The elevator door shut.

  “They used real ravens and gulls in that scene, Hannah. Two stagehands in thick gloves spent hours and hours hurling birds at Tippi Hedren. It took three days to shoot that scene. The poor girl had a nervous collapse at the end of it.”

  He slowly maneuvered his body so that he was standing between her and the elevator doors. “What do you think of that, Hannah?”

  She shrugged uneasily. “Sounds pretty—harrowing.”

  “But Tippi was Hitchcock’s discovery, don’t you see? She may have suffered, but it was for his artistic vision. How far would you go for the sake of realizing an artistic vision?”

  “I don’t think I’d go that far,” she replied, shaking her head.

  The elevator d
oor opened. Hannah brushed past him and ducked out to the corridor. It was as if she hadn’t been able to breathe in there. She glanced up and down the hallway.

  Except for a janitor wheeling a garbage pail and two students lingering by the main entrance, Hannah didn’t see anyone else in the area. She caught a couple of breaths, but she tensed up again when Paul came up to her side.

  “That’s going to be the topic of discussion after the movie,” he said. “How much power should a director have over his leading lady? How much intimidation and control—for the sake of art?”

  “Ought to make for a stimulating discussion,” Hannah said, with a weak smile.

  She remembered Seth talking about how Otto Preminger badgered Jean Seberg during the filming of Bonjour Tristesse. He’d made the same point as Paul about a director’s right to unlimited power over his actors—especially a leading lady he’d “discovered.” She wondered if perhaps Seth had picked up that notion from one of Paul’s lectures. Or did they simply think alike? Maybe Ben was right, maybe Paul and Seth were working together, and she was their unwitting leading lady, their discovery.

  “You seem tense,” Paul said, placing his hand on the back of her neck.

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “I give a terrific neck rub, you know. You’d love it.”

  “I—I better take a rain check on that, too,” she said, edging away from him, toward the main doors.

  “Well, at least let me give you a lift home,” he suggested.

  “Actually, I have someone coming to pick me up. But thanks anyway.” She pushed the heavy door and stepped outside. The chilly October night air felt good.

  Paul came up to her side once more.

  “You don’t have to wait around,” she said. “I’m fine here. I’ll see you in class Thursday. By then, I’ll know when we can get together for our dinner date. I’m really looking forward to it, Paul.”

  His eyes narrowed at her. “Who’s coming to pick you up? Is it that Ben Sturges character? I know you’ve been seeing him.”

  “How would you know that?” Hannah asked.

  “I just know,” he replied. “You disappoint me, Hannah.”

  “Well, don’t be disappointed,” she said, staring him in the eye. “Because you’re wrong about Ben What’s-his-name. I barely know him. The person who’s picking me up is a friend of my son’s baby-sitter. His name is Lars, and he’s sixty-seven years old. Any more questions or objections?”

  He laughed, then kissed her on the cheek. “You can’t fool me. I know you better than you think. Good night, Hannah.”

  Hannah watched him walk toward the parking lot, then disappear around the corner.

  She shuddered, and wiped his kiss from her cheek.

  Hannah didn’t step back inside the school right away. She waited until Paul drove by in his Toyota. She gave him a little wave, and watched the car continue down the street.

  Only then did she duck back inside the college. On her way to the stairwell, she didn’t see anyone in the main corridor. Hannah hurried up the stairs to the third floor. Stepping out to the hallway, she discovered someone had switched off most of the overheads. Only a few spotlights at the exits illuminated the way.

  She headed down the dark corridor, past the lounge. The lights inside the vending machine cast strange shadows across the deserted study area. Everything seemed so still. But then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw some movement near the window. Hannah stopped.

  It took her a moment to realize the phantom motion was merely headlights from passing cars below. Hannah told herself that she was alone here. If someone else was on this floor, she would hear footsteps. Every little sound seemed to reverberate in the empty hallway.

  She continued on toward Paul’s office. She saw a line of light at the threshold under his door. Hannah tried the knob. Locked. “Ben?” she called softly. “Ben, it’s me.”

  The door opened. “Are you okay?” Ben asked. “Did he make a pass?”

  Hannah sighed. “Mostly, he just gave me the creeps.” She stepped inside, then quietly closed the door behind her. “I never figured he was capable of murder, but now I’m not so sure. Something he said has me wondering about Seth, too.”

  Ben nodded. “I told you I didn’t trust him.”

  He moved over to an old wooden file cabinet. The bottom drawer was open. “I’ve already been through the other drawers,” he said, searching the files. “Nothing so far. Ditto the coat closet. But I saw some videos on the shelf. He’s labeled each tape Such and Such a Lecture, and the date. We should take them back to your place tonight and have a look. I can return them here in the morning.”

  Hannah walked around the desk.

  “I tried there,” Ben said, looking up for a moment. “It’s locked.”

  Hannah pulled the key from under the mini-Oscar paperweight, and unlocked the top right-hand drawer. Ben smiled at her. He finished with the file cabinet, then circled around to the desk.

  They each took one side of the desk, and looked through the drawers. Hannah found paper clips, old receipts, and loose change in the top drawer. Just junk. The next drawer down held old lecture notes, clippings of his newspaper reviews, and a couple of spiral notebooks. Hannah paged through one of the notebooks. She read the start of an incomplete screenplay he’d written, called Love in Equinox. The opening scene was of a couple making love. All the while the man talked about how much he hated his dead father. It was pretty terrible.

  “I found his old class lists,” Ben announced, shuffling through some papers. “Names, addresses, phone numbers. Here’s Rae. Huh, Angela Bramford is on this page. I wonder if anyone else listed here died from unnatural causes.” Grabbing a pen and legal pad from the desktop, Ben started copying down the list.

  Hannah went back to flipping through Paul’s rough draft of Love in Equinox. He must have realized how god-awful it was, because there were only twenty-three pages. Hannah noticed that the young heroine stayed naked through most of it, and there was a scene with her masturbating. “You should read how sleazy this script is,” Hannah said. “He—”

  Ben held up his hand, then shushed her.

  Hannah fell silent, and she listened. Footsteps. Someone was coming down the corridor.

  Ben hurried toward the door. He quietly turned the lock and switched off the light. He remained with his back to the wall. They listened to the footsteps becoming louder, closer. Hannah held her breath. She waited until the person outside passed the office. The footsteps grew fainter. Hannah let out a sigh. Ben flicked the lights back on, and he darted back to the desk. “We’d better hurry,” he muttered, sitting on the floor.

  Hannah checked the next drawer down. She noticed a folder hidden beneath some more clippings of his reviews at the bottom of the drawer. She pulled it out and opened it up.

  Several pieces of paper were clipped together. Hannah studied the first page: a montage of slightly grainy photos of a seminude Diane Keaton. The pictures had been taken off a TV set. It was the end scene of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The second page had the stabbing sequence.

  “Oh, my God,” Hannah murmured.

  Paper-clipped to the montage from Looking for Mr. Goodbar were three candid photos. The pretty blonde in the pictures seemed unaware that she was being photographed. The snapshots were all taken on the street, most likely at a distance, then blown up.

  Hannah passed the batch of photos to Ben. “Is this Rae?” she whispered.

  He stared at the snapshots and the stabbing scene from the movie. “Yes, that’s Rae,” he said, his voice strained. “And that’s how he killed her, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, Ben.” Hannah squeezed his arm. Then she glanced down at the next “murder sequence” in the folder.

  Again, the first page showed a series of images photographed from a TV screen. This time, Marilyn Monroe was being chased up a stairwell in a dark, austere-looking building. One photo revealed that the location was an institutional bell tower of some sort. On the s
econd page, Marilyn’s stalker caught up with her. There was a close-up of Joseph Cotton as he put his hands around her throat. The last shot showed Marilyn, dead on the cement floor.

  Attached to the Marilyn death sequence were two photos of a striking redhead in her late twenties. Again, the woman didn’t seem aware of anyone taking her picture.

  “This must be Angela Bramford,” Hannah murmured, giving the photos to Ben. “The pictures of Marilyn are from Niagara.”

  “I don’t get the connection,” Ben whispered. “Wasn’t Angela Bramford found strangled somewhere around the Convention Center?”

  “The bells,” Hannah whispered. “The Convention Center has bells by the stairway to the second-floor terrace. He strangled her under the bells, like Marilyn in the movie.”

  Hannah glanced in the folder. Nothing but a blank piece of typing paper.

  “Shouldn’t he have something about Rae’s friend, Joe?” Ben asked. “And the girl, what’s her name? The Floating Flower…”

  “Lily Abrams,” Hannah said. She looked in the drawer. There weren’t any other folders. “I don’t know.”

  There should have been photographs of those two rude customers, and Ronald Craig, and Britt. Baffled, Hannah gazed down at the class lists that Ben had left on the floor. Then she stared at the two separate batches of murder montage photos and candids.

  “It’s only the two women who took his class,” she said. “Maybe the others don’t matter to him. Maybe he only cares about these two women—the way he now cares about me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ben said.

  “First Angela Bramford, then Rae, and now he’s working on me. The seduction, the intimidation, pulling the strings and putting them through the paces until the death scene is carried out.”

  Hannah slipped the photos back in the folder and closed it. “I think I know what he’s doing,” she whispered. “One after another, he’s made each one of us his leading lady.”

  Seventeen

  “Well, hello there, Hannah, you sorry bitch,” Kenneth Woodley muttered. He studied the photograph taken the day before by his private detective, Walt Kirkabee. It was clearly his Hannah standing outside a store with her tall, blond-haired doofus boyfriend.